Hunter's Moon Read online

  “One lucky son of a bitch,” Tom says, trying but failing to sound sporting and good-natured about it all. “You always were.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I am. Lucky I met Lisa.” He spreads his arms and reaches across the table to grip us both by the biceps. “Lucky to have friends like you two.”

  He is given to such mawkish demonstrations. I shove the deck at him. “Your deal.”

  “Yeah, friends. But sometimes friends…” He shuffles and sets the deck down, staring at it, forehead ridged.

  “What’s wrong? Find a marked card?”

  “We’ve always been up front about everything, right?” His eyes, those eerie pale-blue eyes, swivel from me to Tom and back to me as he coaxes his lips into the half sneer, half smile that’s his way of expressing an injury to his pride. It was the look he’d worn last November, when we’d shamed him into going to Hazelden.

  “I saw you put something in my orange juice.” He motions at his bed, from which he can see into the kitchen. “I’m pretty sure I know what and who asked you to do it and I need to hear if I’m right.”

  “You are,” I admit after a silence.

  “And I suppose she’s been feeding it to me on the sly, too?”

  “Right again.”

  “She told you everything?”

  “She did,” Tom says.

  Bill draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, flapping his lips.

  “Now maybe you can tell us something.” Tom wedges his jaw between his fists and works up his best prosecutorial glare. “You think you’re so lucky to have her, why make her—us, too—look after you when you won’t look after yourself?”

  “Y’know, Tom, every time you ask a question you sound like you’re trying to nail a hostile witness.”

  “You suffer from terminal solipsism, that’s why.”

  “Ante up,” Bill says, and begins to deal. “Now, there’s a word. ‘Solipsism.’”

  “It means self-centered.”

  “It means a theory that the self is the only reality that exists, but you’re close enough.” He passes out the first show cards. “You don’t know any more about what goes on between her and me than I do about you and Julie or Paul and Cheryl. But eff–why-eye, I do give a damn about her. And my girls. And, yeah, you dudes, too.”

  “You might rethink how you show giving a damn.”

  “Hey, listen, I’m taking care of all of them—Lisa and the girls and my ex. How’s that for showing I give a damn?”

  “Time out,” I say, forming a T with my hands. I go upstairs for the Zoloft and plunk the bottle down in front of Bill. “All yours now.”

  He looks at the medication pensively, then unscrews the cap and, tilting his head backward, squeezes the dropper onto his tongue. “Tastes better without the OJ,” he declares, teeth clenched into a slightly malignant grin.

  * * *

  Waking up after midnight, I get into my moccasins, switch on a flashlight, and shuffle outside to piss. The snow has stopped falling, but half an inch covers the ground. I make designs in it with my urine, the movement causing the light in my free hand to twitch back and forth. It illuminates Bill, in nothing but long johns, sitting on the top step of a staircase that leads down to the river from a small deck over the bluff. He turns as the light falls on him, squinting.

  “Back was bothering me, couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d come out here and contemplate if life without a drink is worth living.”

  The attempt to sound jaunty doesn’t quite come off. “Stay out much longer, you’ll freeze to death and then you’ll know.”

  He pats the step, inviting me to sit down. “Sorry for putting you on the spot today.”

  “Kind of a relief, you want to know the truth.”

  “Not my back. Made the mistake of calling my office voicemail before I hit the sack. My biggest advertiser, guy who owns a heating-oil company, is having a bad year. Pulling his ads until things pick up. I’m an old jet jockey. Whatever made me think I could run a newspaper?”

  I have no idea what made him think so. “It’s a small-town paper. Gave you something to do,” I suggest. “Run the family business.”

  “Doesn’t answer the question. Christ, the Register is right back where the old man left it when he died. In intensive care. McNaughton wants to sell off his underachievers, and we’re at the top of the list. He doesn’t find a buyer, it goes belly up and me with it.”

  “You? You’ve got your retirement pay, the—”

  “The trust?” A pause, a bitter chuckle. “Last couple of years, I’ve been peddling ad space at discount rates to keep everybody on board and pulling money out of it to make up the difference. Kind of embezzling from myself.”

  The question in my mind is, Where did you come up with five grand for that shotgun? What I say is, “I thought it was going to, you know, alimony, college expenses…”

  “Lisa told you that, too? Well, it’s not. It’s propping up what you call the family business. That’s not for public consumption. She doesn’t know.”

  “I’m freezing my ass off.”

  We retreat into the cabin. He throws a log into the fireplace and blows on the embers to raise a flame. Tom is emitting snorts and gasps and whistles from the loft above.

  “Paul,” Bill begins in an undertone. “Have you ever … Did you ever feel…” He trails off and strikes a pose, looking down into the fire, palms flat against the river-rock mantelpiece.

  “Did I ever feel what?”

  “Ah, nothing. Forget it.” He twists his head to look at me, one cheek in shadow, the other burnished in the quivering light. “Guess I was wrong. Favre didn’t pull it out.”

  * * *

  I wake up late, panic-stricken because I haven’t gotten out of bed early to administer the Zoloft. Then I remember that I’m now free of that responsibility. Bill’s emotional pendulum has made a wide swing, so wide that I wonder if he’s experiencing a delayed reaction to yesterday’s double dose. He’s almost giddy, staging a comical show as he twirls the dropper over his orange juice with a magician’s flourish.

  After breakfast, he flies into the next room, opens a storage closet, and pulls out a gun we’ve seen him shoot only once or twice in the past: Grandpa Olav’s shotgun, a 12-gauge L. C. Smith with double triggers and exposed hammers. It must be nearly a hundred years old. “A proposition, gentlemen! After yesterday’s confinement, I’ve got cabin fever, so we’ll have dinner in town. If I can’t outshoot the two of you put together with this thing, chow and beverages are on me. Otherwise on you. Are you on?”

  He cranes his neck toward me, fixing me with a direct and confidential gaze—it’s as if Tom isn’t even in the room. A coded message flashes in that look: he isn’t expecting an answer to his sporting challenge; he expects me to keep last night’s conversation to myself, and that’s what I do.

  4.

  Friday night. A fleet of dirty pickup trucks and SUVs are nosed up to the front of the Great Lakes Brew Pub. Under the water-stained ceiling and the blind stares of a bobcat, a coyote, two ratty-skinned bucks, and a snarling black bear mounted on the walls along with vintage logging tools, more people than will be seen in church on Sunday morning are eating and drinking, playing pool, or watching football previews on the two TVs flickering above each end of the long bar: hefty middle-age couples visiting for a weekend of leaf-peeping, a few locals—commercial fishermen, pulp loggers—bird hunters wearing orange caps, and bowhunters dressed like Special Ops commandos in woodsy camouflage.

  We stand near the door, waiting for seats to open up. Bill orders a non-alcoholic beer, Tom and I a couple of drafts. Bill drains his bottle in three long pulls, calls for another, and is halfway through it when four customers vacate the bar. We barge through the crowd to claim the empty stools. Bill lays down two twenties—he lost his wager, having shot two grouse to our combined three—and then goes off to the men’s room. When he comes back five minutes later, Will Treadwell, the owne
r, takes our orders. Pizzas and drafts for Tom and me. Whitefish and another near-beer for Bill. Treadwell looks at him as if he hasn’t heard right; he’s known Bill a long time but doesn’t know about his stay in Hazelden.

  “I’m in recovery,” Bill explains. “I was recently diagnosed with solipsism, and now I’m getting over it.”

  Treadwell clutches a bottle of O’Doul’s in a fist that, many years ago, had done damage in Kronk’s gym in Detroit and that, despite his fifty-four years, still looks capable of fracturing a jaw. “No idea what you’re talking about, but congratulations anyway,” he says, and spins away to tend to another customer.

  By the time the food arrives, Bill has consumed two more O’Doul’s and gone to the men’s room again. He knocks back a third with dinner, and then, with his whitefish only half eaten, he pushes off for yet another pit stop.

  “Better get your prostate checked,” Tom says to his back.

  While Bill’s gone, Treadwell falls into an argument with Tom about the presidential campaign. Treadwell fought with the Marines in Vietnam and calls himself a “left-wing survivalist” to describe his politics and lifestyle—he and his half-Ojibwa wife live in the woods, sustaining themselves on what she cans and what he shoots or hooks. Tom, the ardent Republican—he’s running unopposed for a second term as Ingham County prosecutor—is carrying on about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, exposing Kerry “for the fraud he is.” Treadwell counters that they’re neither truthful nor swift and probably aren’t even veterans, “like your chubby vice president, the guy who didn’t go to Vietnam because he had other priorities.”

  Tom sputters, “He’s your vice president, too. Or have you renounced your citizenship?”

  “I might do that if Bush and Dickbrain get reelected.”

  Tom has no comeback. Treadwell bares large, straight teeth in a cartoon smile. “You rose to the fly like a retarded brook trout.”

  “Ha!” Bill, returning from the men’s room, bangs his palm on the bar. “Tha’s good! Retarded brook trout! A nighty-nightcap, Will. One more bottle of your finest Irish fakery.”

  “Finest Irish” comes out as “fineish arish,” and Treadwell looks at him quizzically as he dips into the cooler. The bottle is soon drained, “a dead shoulder,” Bill proclaims, and waves an index finger to and fro as he sings, “Now we are all dead and gone, for we are the arish, now we are all dead and gone, for we are the arish shoulders…”

  A young, hulking bowhunter in a knit cap and jacket printed with leaves and branches looms over the jukebox, punching buttons. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” drowns out Bill’s Celtic ditty …

  The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

  Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee …

  “Hate thish fucking song.”

  It’s now perfectly clear that Bill’s prostate isn’t what’s been sending him to the bathroom. Tom snarls in disgust, “Goddamn you, Erickson,” as Bill spins off the barstool and lurches to the jukebox …

  The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

  When the skies of November turn gloomy …

  … and, reaching behind the machine, jerks the plug.

  “Fuck Gordon Lightfoot! I give you Longfellow!” he hollers into the sudden quiet, and begins to recite The Song of Hiawatha at bullhorn level. “From the forests and the prairies/ From the great lakes of the Northland/ From the land of the Ojibways…” Slurring the “j” and every “s.”

  Some customers look at him nonplussed; some giggle at the impromptu show. The bowhunter and his buddies aren’t laughing. Tom and I aren’t, either. Maybe we would be if we hadn’t gone through the trouble of getting him into rehab, if we hadn’t made that pledge to Lisa; now, watching the failure of our mission, we feel that Bill is making fools of us as he makes one of himself, flinging his arms like a nineteenth-century thespian. “From the land of the Dacotahs/ From the mountains, moors, and fenlands/ Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh … the Shuh-shuh … the wha’ever the fuck…”

  “Let’s get him home,” Tom says, acid in his voice.

  But before we can get to him, the brawny archer stiff-arms Bill into a wall. He slides to the floor, bellowing, “The Shuh-shuh-gah! Tha’s it, the Shuh-shuh-gah … Feeds among the reeds and rushes…” while the bowhunter muscles the jukebox with the ease of a furniture mover, plugs it back in, and pumps quarters into the slot. With Gordon Lightfoot again mourning the Edmund Fitzgerald, he stomps back to his table. Treadwell comes out from behind the bar and points an aluminum billy at him. “No trouble out of you, friend.”

  The bowman gestures at Bill. “That asshole’s the trouble.”

  Tom and I are wrestling Bill to his feet, and in the struggle a hip flask falls out of his jacket pocket. Treadwell picks it up, and with the billy jammed in his belt, escorts us toward the door, past the bowhunters’ table. I’m nearest to it, Bill between Tom and me. I don’t see the Gordon Lightfoot fan stick out a leg, only the insolent look on his face as I stumble and Bill crashes facedown onto the pine-board floor.

  “Hey, dickhead,” Tom says. “You made your point before.”

  He jumps up, all bulk and youthful leverage. “You want a problem, here I am.”

  What amazes me is that Tom is ready to go toe-to-toe with him. All I can think of is how undignified it will be for a district attorney to appear in court and a professor of Russian literature to return to classes with their eyes blackened or noses broken in a northwoods bar brawl, when Treadwell intervenes. Pushing Tom aside, he bangs the club on the table.

  “You’ve got the problems. You’re eighty-sixed. Pay up.”

  You can almost see the bowhunter’s brain making quick calculations. One old man versus four of them. But the club, the heavyweight’s shoulders, the scarred knuckles, the bared forearm thick as an average man’s calf, bearing a tattoo of a bayonet thrust through a skull’s eye sockets, and the banner under the skull’s jaw—USMC. Death Before Dishonor—counsel discretion. He slaps a twenty and a ten on the table and leaves with his fellow archers. The jukebox is now mute, the whole place as hushed as a theater at curtain rise.

  A waitress scoops up the bills, glances at the tab, and groans, “They owed thirty-six fifty.”

  Treadwell promises to make up the difference and add a tip, then gives us a hand hauling Bill into an upright position. He grins stupidly, a red lump rising on his forehead. Treadwell twists the cap on the silver flask engraved with Bill’s initials, shakes out a few drops into his palm, and licks. “Scotch” he says, handing the flask to me. Then to Bill: “No private stock allowed. You’re eighty-sixed, too.”

  * * *

  He is the last out of bed—no surprise there. He shambles to the small mirror above the kitchen sink, delicately presses the bruise above his right eye with a forefinger, and claims to have no memory of how it got there or of the events preceding its acquisition. I’m skeptical about the amnesia but give him a summary nonetheless. Tom introduces the evidence. Exhibit A: the flask. Exhibit B: a bottle of Johnnie Walker, half empty.

  “Found the scotch in your duffel last night. Didn’t have time to get a search warrant, sorry.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “The part I like was that sanctimonious speech. About being up front? I really like that.”

  “I said, all right.”

  “We promised Lisa, so it’s not all right,” I say. “It’s about three time zones from all right.”

  “We would’ve gotten our asses handed to us if Treadwell hadn’t been there.” Tom points the bottle of scotch in his face for emphasis. “You’re a selfish guy, Bill.”

  “Terminally solipsistic, right.”

  Tom’s upper lip quivers, and though it’s chilly with no fire going, beads of sweat glitter on his scalp. “Booze isn’t your problem. You’re a poor little rich boy, that’s your problem. You’ve always had somebody to run interference for you and clean up behind you. Your dad, your wives, your friends. Who did that when you were a flyboy? Some en
listed flunky?”

  “I apologize, okay?” says Bill sullenly. “Sorry for letting you down. I…” He frowns as if in thought, then grabs Johnnie Walker by the neck, empties it into the sink, and dramatically holds it over the trash can before dropping it in. “My last drink, solemn promise.”

  It sounds more like an appeal than an oath. Tom, in the righteous tones of a cuckold telling his wife they’re through, says that it’s a little late for promises.

  Bill asks, “Are you done now?”

  Tom shrugs and smirks, petulantly, it seems to me.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Bill says. “Last night was last night, and today’s today, and it’s our last day.” He goes to his jacket, hanging by a peg above his bunk, plucks a map from a pocket, and waves it around like it’s a winning lottery ticket. “The honey hole I told you about. Let’s try to close out in style.”

  * * *

  Low clouds, patched with blue, glide on a light northerly breeze. Clear sky shows far out over Superior, ruffled with whitecaps. The climate inside the truck is far darker. Tom, at the wheel, doesn’t speak. He’s not quite through punishing Bill, letting him know, through his silence, that he’s been betrayed. Remembering his readiness to trade punches with the bowhunter, a thought enters my mind: his attachment to Bill is more complicated than mine. He likes playing the part of his anointed-but-wayward brother’s protector, however much he complains about it. Bill’s weakness is, as it’s always been, the one thing that makes Tom feel superior.